


Dead Man's Switch

by LadyFelixTristis



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Crack, Crack, It's Not Paranoia If They're Really Out To Get You, M/M, Paranoia, Paranoid Will Graham, Pre-Slash, Sassy Will Graham, Smart Will Graham, Will Graham Helps Himself, Will Graham Loves Dogs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-06
Updated: 2021-01-06
Packaged: 2021-03-16 13:33:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28582809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyFelixTristis/pseuds/LadyFelixTristis
Summary: It is a little known fact that Will Graham minored in computer science and programming, and is as paranoid as a spy."Are you trying to turn your house into a fortress?" He imagines some asshole asking. "Are you one of those weirdos who think a zombie apocalypse is an actual possibility?"No. These precautions are just good sense.  And you know what is a possibility? A non-zombie apocalypse (obviously!). Maybe nuclear. He’s looking into an underground shelter.(Crack!AU - Will wins S1!)
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 24
Kudos: 238





	Dead Man's Switch

It is a little known fact that Will Graham minored in computer science and programming, and is as paranoid as a spy. 

He may or may not have coated his house’s windows in security film so that even some asshole wielding a sledgehammer will be hard-pressed to break through. It’s possible that he is actively considering installation of fail-safe solenoid locks. He’s still working on reinforcing the walls and door frames, though, so those have to wait. 

_Are you trying to turn your house into a fortress?_ He imagines some asshole asking. _Are you one of those weirdos who think a zombie apocalypse is an actual possibility?_

No. These precautions are just good sense. And you know what _is_ a possibility? A non-zombie apocalypse (obviously!). Maybe nuclear. He’s looking into an underground shelter.

On a day-to-day practical level, he doesn’t have much going on that’s obvious. He has to turn his lights on with switches. He hasn’t programmed himself an A.I. He cultivates his “smart guy, but can barely take care of himself” persona. It’s useful. But he does have automated, timed feeders for his dogs. And a dog door in the back opens into a protected, camera-monitored yard, topped with a wire mesh net. 

His rare visitors might side-eye the tall concrete wall surrounding his back yard in the middle of nowhere. No doubt, they wonder what he’s hiding back there. 

It’s none of their goddamn business. 

He works for the FBI, _okay_? He might have enemies. He can’t risk someone easily breaking or cutting through a fence and hurting his dogs. He can’t risk them throwing poisoned food, or grapes, or garlic, or chocolate over the top. He loves his dogs. Call him paranoid if you want. 

He’s just protective. 

Blanketing his home and its surroundings with hidden security cameras is entirely reasonable. He might live in a farm house in the country, but he’s not a _feral creature_. He’s not a _barbarian_. _Of course_ he has cameras. 

His camera network means he can keep an eye on the dogs when he isn’t home. And he can entertain himself by occasionally watching videos of the squirrels and raccoons running and playing out front.

_(It’s the little things.)_

It also means he doesn't have to look out through the window to find out who has dared to approach his house, when he _is_ at home. Peaking through windows easily gives away his presence and position to any “visitor.” 

_(Intruder.)_

Someone might expect him to open the door, if they know he’s there. Or they might shoot him. Why take such risks when they’re so easily avoided?

He almost never actually answers his door. A lot of people don’t answer their door and don’t want people to know whether or not they’re home, so absolutely no one can convince him that hiding his car in the barn every day is unreasonable. He hates interacting with most people. He likes his privacy. It's not that weird. 

And yeah, okay, a lot of people think of camera systems as a _deterrent_. They _post signs_ warning about cameras in use, and make the cameras obvious. Yeah well, he’s seen way too many cameras get shot out or have their wires cut. Nobody can sabotage his setup if they don’t know it’s there. 

Suspicious parents don’t _tell the babysitter_ about the nanny cam hidden in the stuffed bear. He wants to have _evidence of the wrongdoing of others_. He doesn’t want to _regularly replace damaged cameras._

\---

Freddie Lounds, that _bitch_ , posted a photograph of him - his face _plainly visible_ \- captioned with _his real name_ on the _goddamn internet_.

He’s been on a crusade to keep his photograph off of the internet since the internet started displaying photographs. 

He has zero social media presence for good reason. 

For one thing, he doesn’t want anyone to know anything about him. 

For another, he hates most other people and doesn’t want to know anything about his coworkers and “friends.” 

It baffles him, the way some people post on the internet _pictures of all the places they regularly visit!_ That kind of carelessness leads to _being stalked and murdered!_

He should know. He has personally internet-stalked and murdered such people.

He frequently adds up to half an hour to his commute simply to vary his route to and from home, yet these people freely share where and when they stop for coffee, go drinking, go jogging, on and on. 

And they post _pictures of the food they make_. To him, that sounds like a great way to tell everybody exactly what you usually keep in your refrigerator so they can break into your house and replace your ingredients with poisoned substitutions. It’s a tactic he, himself, has used.

People are absolutely insane. 

He may be some kind of crazy, but he’s not _that_ kind of crazy.

Freddie Lounds, for violating his privacy and other crimes, deserves to _die_. It’s a shame that he’ll be a prime suspect if that happens in the near future. He’ll have to put a pin in it and try to keep off her radar long enough for her to move on to writing shit about other people. 

After that? Well. Who can really say.

\---

Hannibal Lecter is _hiding things_. He has _secrets_. 

Hannibal Lecter is _his kind of guy_.

He doesn’t trust people who can’t even keep secrets about _themselves_. Anything he does or says in front of open and friendly people will almost immediately spread like disease to everyone they come into contact with.

Case in point, that fuckface Zeller, the obvious leak. He’d like to cut that guy’s dick off so Freddie fucking Lounds can’t ride it for information. 

Will knows that the Doctor has discretion as a professional. He must, or he’d have no patients. But it’s the fact that he lets almost nothing of substance about himself be known that really counts. It means that he can keep Will’s secrets, too. 

Not that Will intends to tell him his _secret_ secrets. But he’ll open up a little. Draw the other man in, keep him interested.

Thing is, Hannibal Lecter is also _strangely attractive_. Will legit thought himself to be completely straight pre-Lecter. 

Yeah, well, his cramping right hand has something to say about that.

\---

He doesn't exactly trust Dr. Lecter, but when the man offers to feed his dogs while he is out of town, he shrugs and agrees. Dr. Lecter doesn't have to know he will be watching. It isn't _that_ creepy. It's not like there is a camera in the bathroom. Not pointed at the toilet or shower, anyway. Just the door and sink. It's not like he's a voyeur. 

So he explains that the dogs don’t need to be fed or let outside, but would appreciate human interaction and attention. He will still have his normal long-day-at-the-office dog sitter out, but Dr. Lecter is offering his services _gratis_ and the dogs will enjoy the extra attention. So. That seems okay.

The first "human detected on camera ___" series of alerts on his phone proves to be his normal dog sitter. She’s a very kind, very boring middle-aged woman with teenage children she likes to escape from, and a few dogs of her own. She stays for an hour. Nothing out of the ordinary.

The second “human detected on camera ___” series of alerts several hours later show Hannibal Lecter. 

Hannibal spoiling the dogs with chunks of sausage out of a paper sack. Hannibal giving out ear scratches and praise. Hannibal asking the dogs to sit, lay, stay, roll over, and shake. Hannibal carefully finishing one of his fishing flies. 

Will smiles. Dr. Lecter isn’t so bad. 

—

When Will is in the hospital after his collapse, and Hannibal again volunteers to see to his dogs, Will agrees again. It went well enough the last time. He doesn’t watch the cameras live after checking that the human detected is, in fact, Dr. Lecter. Not until that evening, before he settles in to sleep, does he play back what happened earlier in the day.

And this time? When Hannibal approaches Will’s fly tying table, it isn’t to finish up one of his flies. Will doesn’t have any incomplete ones set out. Instead, it’s to add several flies to his collection.

“The fuck?” he asks himself. “What’s he up to?”

Will is not a trusting man. Maybe Dr. Lecter is kindly gifting him with flies, maybe mixing them into his existing flies because he doesn’t think Will would accept them as gifts. Maybe. 

But probably not. 

Will doesn’t trust a single living human. Plus, he’s been going even crazier than usual and doesn’t understand what’s happening to him. He’s in the hospital after losing time and collapsing in a fever haze, for fuck’s sake (which he does not like _even a little bit_ \- he _hates_ hospitals). 

He doesn’t want to think Hannibal is like everybody else who can’t be trusted. He actually _likes_ the guy, even if he is a goddamn psychiatrist. But the man is up to _something_ , and he doesn’t know what.

He flexes his thumbs in preparation for his task. 

It’s easy to grab the footage of Hannibal from earlier that day. He uploads it to various cloud storage locations, writes a text file to explain what about the footage seems off to him, then puts to use a dead man’s switch he had programmed a few years previously. It’s no biggie. He’ll just have to press a button at least once a week to keep the footage from being automatically emailed to Jack and his team, his own boss in the academy, his lawyer, and a few reporters. _Not_ that bitch Freddie Lounds. Just a few crime reporters who haven’t lied about cases he’s been involved with. He’s generally not a fan of the media, but if the FBI tries to cover anything up and his lawyer is corrupted, the media is his best bet to keep them in line. 

He doesn’t want to think that Hannibal is up to something nefarious, but he hasn’t survived this long by _trusting_ people. While he’s at it, he sets up another switch to send his camera cloud storage password to his lawyer, same weekly schedule. Just in case.

After all, the dead man’s switch is _there, available to use_ , its only other task being to contact his dog-sitter and a rescue organization he’s familiar with, in case he doesn’t confirm his continued survival once a week. The feeders last a few weeks if they’re full. If no one noticed his death or kidnapping and didn’t know to check on his dogs, he would never forgive himself. The dead man’s switch was created originally to be a weight off of his mind, and it is still serving that purpose. Now in multiple ways.

\---

That _motherfucker_. Will _knew_ that asshole had been up to something. 

Luckily? He’d been unconscious for more than a week, being treated for the gunshot wound (Jack is 100% on his shit list) and then the encephalitis, once they’d realized his fever wasn’t due to a normal infection. 

Yeah, yeah, maybe he shouldn’t have bailed on the prison transport and kidnapped his psychiatrist-friend-crush. His brain had been _on fire_. He had been extremely far from his _right mind._ He can be forgiven for making a mistake, can’t he? Fucking Jack and his fucking gun.

The footage of Hannibal _planting evidence_ was sent to everybody via his dead man’s switch program before he’d even known what was happening. Hannibal, who had seen the confused update on the newspaper’s website, had been in the process of hurriedly stashing some belongings in a suitcase when the SWAT team arrived. 

He’d managed to murder a few of the team before they took him down. Will was thankful that the stubborn fucker hadn’t died from the several gunshot wounds he’d collected. 

Anyway, Will’s camera hard drive and backup cloud storage are massive and nothing gets deleted without his say-so. So, his lawyer was able to offer up video of Hannibal planting more evidence while Will was blacked out or something (who else had been in his home that he didn’t know about?!), intubating him and shoving a human ear down his throat (what. the. fuck!) _and_ provide alibis for some of the _murders he had supposedly committed._

None of them were murders he had _actually_ committed. He doesn’t keep trophies because he isn’t a fucking idiot, and for fuck’s sake, he is a forensics specialist. He knows how to not have evidence laying around his house. He isn’t _Hannibal_ , the _idiot_ , whose basement and freezers betrayed a cornucopia of DNA. 

The important thing is, Will isn’t too worried about any of _his actual murders_ being tied to him.

His incarceration was very brief indeed and limited entirely to the hospital. 

And Hannibal finds himself in the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, maybe even occupying the cell in which Will might have found himself had he been less vigilant. 

The cell is a far cry from Hannibal’s usual surroundings. Bare, rough stone walls. Thin, humidity-stained mattress. Will _almost_ feels sorry for the guy.

It’s a shame, really. Will honestly does like Hannibal, as much as he is capable of liking any human. Only lately did he realize what Hannibal had been trying to accomplish all that time, bringing out his “inner darkness” while letting his brain burn. 

Will is a good liar, and he isn’t stupid enough to admit his actual secrets to anyone. Not even his dogs. Hannibal had been ignorant of the true extent of his existing darkness, and wasted a whole lot of unnecessary time and effort. 

Sad, really. 

He would have liked to explore their relationship. Gotten closer. 

They could have had something really special.

But to be honest? Even if the bastard manages to escape his confinement, Hannibal _got caught_ , the stupid fucker. Will doesn’t have much use for someone who _gets caught_. He’s hardly going to give up his comfortable life to become some sort of accomplice or go on the run, even if he is a little bit hot for the guy. He’d look guilty as hell. 

If Hannibal escapes prison, then _kidnaps him_ , he might be willing to go along with it as long as they can make his resistance look good on some surveillance cameras. He could play up some captor bonding. He’s known to be emotionally unstable, anyway. When Hannibal inevitably _gets caught again_ , he could convince everybody that he’d had no choice, easy.

The only hiccup would be his unwillingness to give up his dogs. His reset dead man’s switch takes care of their upkeep, at least. The message to the dog rescue now includes bank account information. Money enough to cover boarding and expenses for a few years, at minimum. He was lucky, last time, that when the rescue retrieved his dogs from the FBI Animal Services, they didn't rehome them. They had a policy to hold on to dogs involved in criminal investigations until proceedings had finished. Apparently, it was something they'd dealt with before. 

In other news, Miriam Lass and Abigail Hobbs turned up alive, and the three of them are like “Hannibal Lecter fucked us over” peas in a support group pod. Except Miriam is pretty confused. She initially thought _Chilton_ of all people was her captor. Some supposedly reputable psychiatrists have been trying to undo her brainwashing, with some success. Unfortunately for her, she’ll never be an agent as she had once dreamed. She’s even less stable than Will is.

Abigail, the _betrayer_ , donated her ear and blood to the “framing Will for multiple murders” plan, so he’s pretty pissed at her. Out of spite, he’d told Jack that she helped her father lure the placeholder girls. Granted, he also pointed out that Jack would never get a conviction. Impressionable girl, forced to help her overbearing father lure the other girls? She definitely hadn’t murdered them herself, and he hadn’t been enough of a dick to out her for her killing of Boyle (Hannibal had been a convenient scapegoat, there). Abigail will be in inpatient psychiatric care for a while, but she’ll never see prison time. 

And Will? 

Will and Hannibal’s verbal sparring matches are maybe/maybe-not permanently relocated to the BSHCI. Will visits Hannibal every week for a conversation. The Doctor is even more strangely attractive with his prison-issued shorter hair. Or maybe it’s the lack of product? The absence of plaids and paisleys are another improvement.

Hannibal’s not even bitter about Will turning the tables on him with his use of technology. If anything, he found the situation amusing. The man’s such a dinosaur that he hadn’t even known that cameras could be hidden that thoroughly. It’s a wonder he hadn’t been caught before. 

Will is much better at working cases now that his brain fire has been extinguished. He’s back to enjoying the time spent in the minds of other killers instead of becoming overwhelmed and dreading it. 

He’s using the money he won in his lawsuit against Hannibal to construct the underground shelter he’d been dreaming of, and stock it with provisions. It hadn’t hurt when Hannibal instructed his fancy-pants lawyer to be generous with the settlement. 

Will passed Hannibal a note a while back explaining that, should the apocalypse occur, the man is welcome to break out of BSHCI and hunker down with him in his shelter. He’s stocking it for 4 humans and 10 dogs, just in case he forgives Abigail and feels like inviting Miriam too. And it’s likely he’ll accumulate a few more dogs. That’s just what happens. 

It was edible paper, of course. No way in hell does he want that blowhard Chilton to know about his shelter. 

Overall, life is good. Could be better if Hannibal wasn’t such a fucking idiot. But even with his psychiatrist-friend-crush inconveniently locked away and thus impossible to fuck, Will is happy.

And if anyone ever again criticizes his “paranoia” and “unnecessary precautions”? He just has to remind them that _he_ with his _technology_ and _clever planning_ defeated the goddamn Chesapeake Ripper. Absolutely no one else in the world can honestly claim the same.


End file.
